Sunday, May 17, 2015

It took me a long time to read Lena Eltang’s Картахена(Cartagena), a detective novel
(of sorts) set in Italy. It’s not just that the book is 541 pages of
not-so-large type. Or that I was busy and distracted by work and snow in mid-winter.
Some books just demand slow, deliberate readings, and Cartagena is so filled with textured landscapes, nuanced
characters, plot twists, and lovely turns of phrase that even my multi-month reading felt
a little too fast.

My brother was killed at dawn and found at eight in the
morning, when the fish market opened. His body was lying in a large basin with
salt.

The victim is Brie (yes, like the cheese) and the narrator
is his sister, Petra, a law student who just happens to have been on her way to
her hometown that same morning. Petra decides to stay, to try to figure out
what happened to her brother; she ends up getting a job at the Briatico, a curious
old waterfront hotel/nursing home with a troubled history that includes (but of
course) other mysterious deaths.

Eltang shifts her narration between several figures, all of
them unpleasant and/or unreliable in their own ways. Petra gets the most ink,
though I had a particular affection for The Gardener’s brief passages: this may
be partly because I so enjoyed his early discussion of eating mussels during a
camping trip, describing, among other things, how his girlfriend (who later
dumps him) “pricked them with a pin, sniffed them, counted the rings.” As a
coastal Mainer who eats a lot of seafood and has friends who own a lobster pound, I’m a sucker for bits of information like this: I’d never heard
of testing mussels with a pin. But I digress! Another narrator is a mysterious
blogger with the name Flautista_libico, who’s obviously come to the Briatico to
try to take possession of the place. Those characters’ passages are written in
the first-person, though Markus’s travels are presented in the third-person: Markus has returned from
London after writing a book about a woman he’s lost.

Cartagena covers a
lot more in its 540 pages: a chapel fire, rehashings (and rehashings of rehashings) of
old murders, family conflicts, Brie’s ambition for quick money, a priceless
stamp, romances, Petra’s visits to the police with theories, a young woman’s
disappearance, and the workings of the Briatico itself, which feels almost like
a hermetically sealed murder setting… I could go on and on.

What fascinates me most about Cartagena, though, is Eltang’s ability to boil nearly everything in the
novel down to identity, secrets, family, and masks. She gives us Brie, Petra,
and their ailing mother, but she also gives us the family that’s owned and run
the Briatico, as well as characters who—as is obvious, based on the names I
listed a paragraph above—hide under nicknames, professions, and dye jobs. They wear
costumes, too: the play the staff stages at the Briatico even plays a role in the
real-life drama in Cartagena. When I
look back at my notes, many of which question whether some Character X might be
some Character Y’s relative, I realize how many hints Eltang plants throughout
the book, placing them in various strata of characters’ truths and lies. Of
course I’m not going to spill the details so will just say that Cartagena is wonderful slow reading. As I
read, I kept thinking back to how Eltang mentioned in a Facebook comment that the
devil is in the details in Cartagena.
It’s tremendous fun to sort through—slowly, of course—all the details and
stories, that her devilish characters present under various guises.

Up next: I’m very
excited about this year’s Big Book Award finalists, which will be announced on
Tuesday: I’m a brand-new member of Big Book’s Literary Academy and will have a
vote this year. This means that, yes, I’ll be reading all the finalists this
time around. Read Russia Award finalists come later in the week. And then, two
books: Eugene Vodolazkin’s Solovyov and
Larionov, which I’ll start translating this summer, and Sergei Nosov’s Член общества, или Голодное время (something
like Member of the Society or A Time of
Hunger), the sad-but-funny story of a man’s life after selling all his
Dostoevsky.

Disclaimers: I
read Cartagana after translating
excerpts last fall and would, yes, love to translate the entire book and sort
through all its devilish details. Lena Eltang was tremendously helpful in
answering my questions about the excerpts: a brief list of questions generated
some fun local specifics about mussel selection, crab fishing, and olive growing.